Sealed settlements could kill

Secrecy kills. Sometimes you can even put a number on it. For instance, 13 - the number of people who've died in crashes involving Chevrolet Cobalts with defective ignition switches.

The victims could have known the danger they were facing. Better yet, the switches could have been fixed. But neither happened, in part because settlements that would have exposed the flaw were sealed - a recurring practice that has repeatedly left the public blind to an assortment of risks that the guilty prefer to hide.

The pattern is always the same: A victim harmed by a defective product or abusive practice sues or threatens to sue. The defendant settles, but only on the condition that the deal be kept secret. The public is left in the dark.

In the Cobalt case, the adoptive parents of Amber Marie Rose, a 16-year-old Maryland girl killed in a Cobalt crash, settled with General Motors after discovering that the ignition switch had shut down power to the car's air bags. Amber had been drinking and speeding, but she might have lived had the air bags deployed.

The matter was settled with confidentiality in 2005 - nine years before GM admitted the problem and recalled 750,000 cars.

Outrageous as it sounds, such secrecy is routine. Powerful companies and institutions regularly suppress information about public risks, ranging from incompetent doctors to abusive priests to defective products.

Secrecy thrives because it benefits the parties involved, none more than businesses that want to avoid embarrassment and lawsuits. Plaintiffs and their lawyers often go along for bigger, speedier settlements. And judges approve to move cases along on their crowded calendars.

Amber's case, and the sealing of GM documents in another fatal Cobalt crash case settled last September, are the latest among many examples:

Starting in the early 1990s, the Archdiocese of Boston secretly settled claims of child molestation against at least 70 priests to avoid public scandal, The Boston Globe reported in 2002. Secrecy hid abuse - ultimately uncovered in dioceses across the nation - and its enablers high in the church hierarchy.

In 1998, two years before Bridgestone/Firestone recalled 6.5 million tires linked to 88 U.S. deaths, documents about the faulty tires were suppressed in a lawsuit at Firestone's request. The family of a West Virginia football player had sued after he was killed when the tread peeled away on a Firestone ATX tire and his Ford Explorer rolled over.

In 2006, The Seattle Times uncovered 420 cases in King County Superior Court sealed by judges' orders. They hid child molesters, unethical lawyers, negligent doctors and missteps by local and state agencies.

Supporters of secrecy claim that it usually involves "trade secrets," as if every case were like Coca-Cola being forced to reveal its secret formula. But faulty tires or ignition switches aren't Coke.

A few places - Washington state, Florida and a federal court in South Carolina - have found ways to make information more difficult to hide. Out-of-court settlements are the toughest to police; perhaps publicly traded corporations could be required to include that data in their annual financial reports.

But for cases that reach state or federal courts, judges already have plenty of authority to insist on full disclosure. When information involves lethal products, abusive priests or incompetent doctors, judges should be forcing the information into the public eye, not leaving the news media to pry it out.

- USA Today

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Sealed settlements could kill

Secrecy kills. Sometimes you can even put a number on it. For instance, 13 ? the number of people who've died in crashes involving Chevrolet Cobalts with defective ignition switches.